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Edwin Brady (August 7, 1869 - August 22, 1952), writer (The Ways of Many Waters; Australia Unlimited; River Rovers), journalist and editor (Australian Workman – succeeded by George Black in 1892; The Dead Bird, later called Bird-o’-Freedom and then renamed The Arrow; The Grip; Worker; The Native Companion et al), friend of Henry Lawson. Brady was one of the founders of the Australian Labor Party.

He is not so well known these days, but a century ago EJ Brady was one of Australia’s best-known poets and authors. What’s more, he had an important role in one of the most seminal moments in the life of Australia’s most famous writer, Henry Lawson.

EJ Brady, was part of the circle of writers now known as ‘The Bulletin School’, a remarkable stable of writers who dominated the Australian literary scene for several decades from the 1880s. He was a great mate of Lawson’s, but also a friend or acquaintance of many of Australia’s greats: Roderic Quinn, Christopher Brennan, AB 'Banjo' Paterson, Victor Daley, Mary Gilmore, Ethel Turner, John Le Gay Brereton, Brunton Stephens – he even 'discovered' the writers Katherine Mansfield and Katharine Susannah Prichard.

Brady was born at Carcoar, New South Wales on August 7, 1869. He was proud of a long family tradition in Northern Ireland and the United States, and once remarked that “my pedigree has always been longer than my purse”. 

His father, Edward Brady, fought in the American Civil War and Indian Wars before coming to this country where he worked as a trooper in the Mounted Police Force, on the trail of bushrangers in central and western NSW. In 1880 Edward and Hannah Brady took the family to Washington for two years, and Edwin, who had been schooled at Oberon, had to adjust to American ways. Perhaps it was here that he discovered the republicanism that informed his views for most of his life.

In 1882, while living at Haymarket, Sydney, he was a pupil at St Francis’ School, with two fellow pupils, Roderic Quinn and Christopher Brennan, who also became two of Australia’s most respected litterateurs. However, it was his later education at St Mary’s Cathedral School in Sydney, to which ‘Ted’ Brady ascribed his love of literature.

In 1884 he left school and worked with a civil engineer at thirty shillings a week. The work was dangerous, with young Ted riding in a bucket on a chain, lowered into excavations for a sewer line. Many men were injured and some contracted typhoid, but Brady survived.

Someone with Brady’s restless intellect, however, was unlikely to last long down the sewers of Sydney, and before long he studied for and gained his matriculation, but his soul was also restless and he dropped out of Sydney University to take a job as a timekeeper on the Sydney wharves for Dalgety and Co. at twenty shillings a week.

He worked for Dalgety’s in different jobs around Sydney until, during the Great Maritime Strike of 1890, he refused his employer’s order to become a “special constable” to oppose the striking trade unionists and protect the company’s property. His decision was inevitably a final one as far as his current earnings of two pounds a week went, but he followed his conscience and was prepared to pay the price. As the historian Bruce Scates writes, “Brady traded the complacent security of home and office for the boozy fellowship of boarding house and Bulletin”.

He found himself unemployed at a time of immense unemployment and poverty in a Sydney very different from today’s city – about ten percent of today’s population, and (still at federation in 1901) one in four children dying before the age of five.

Sydney in the five years from 1890 – the time of the 1890s Depression – was not only a literary hotbed, it was alive with radicalism. Jack Lang, who later became one of NSW’s most famous premiers, was turning the handle to print Arthur Desmond's anarchist journal called Hard Cash, and an English immigrant named Billy Hughes was working on it as well – of course, Hughes went on to be a controversial Prime Minister of Australia. William Holman, another soon-to-be Premier of NSW, was another activist in Brady’s circle. Meanwhile, Jack Lang’s brother-in-law, Henry Lawson, was writing fiery poems encouraging bloody revolution.

As had famously happened in Melbourne, troopers fixed bayonets and set up machine gun nests near Parliament House, Sydney, as in two great waves, 1890-1 and 1894-5, strikers grew restless and governments grew impatient. There were numerous ships bombed (such as the SS Aramac) and burned (eg, the Paddle Steamer Rodney), and arson was all too common on sheep stations – such as the burning of the Dagworth Station shed on September 1, 1894 and the subsequent death (murder or suicide, next to a billabong, they say), of one of the arsonists, the shearer Sam ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister, who was being chased by three troopers and the squatter, Robert McPherson. (A few weeks later, Banjo Paterson wrote a song with McPherson’s musical sister Christina about this swagman, a pretty lay that one or two readers will have heard.) Also in this brief period, about 600 Australians felt that they would never get a fair life working in Australia so they sailed to Paraguay to form a communal settlement called New Australia.

Such was the milieu in Sydney at the time Brady began his adult years and career as a writer and activist. He joined the new Australian Socialist League (becoming its Secretary), and became a member of the Labor Electoral League (later the Australian Labor Party). He edited its first newspaper, The Australian Workman, and organised the Clerical and Mercantile Workers Association of NSW – really the country’s first clerical workers’ union, the first meetings of which were held in secret. 

He not only came to know the writers mentioned above, but early Labor politicians such as Lang, Hughes, Holman, AG ‘The Mudgee Camel’ Taylor (first editor of Truth and The Spectator), John Norton, the eccentric King O’Malley, Australia’s first PM Edmund Barton, and Chris Watson, third Prime Minister of Australia and the first Labor PM, as well as many celebrities such as the theatrical entrepreneur JC Williamson.

Brady and Lawson meet

In 1891, Henry Lawson was sacked from his job in Brisbane on The Boomerang, a radical newspaper formerly run by William Lane, because the paper was not making any money (it managed to struggle on for just another six months and ceased abruptly on April 9, 1892). The last poem of his that they published was ‘The Cambaroora Star’, in the Boomerang’s Christmas edition by which time Lawson was back in Sydney, mostly destitute but selling all he could write. 

Early in the New Year of 1892, Brady, then only 22 was editing The Australian Workman, by then the official organ of the Sydney Trades and Labour Council, at 3 pounds a week. The sub-editor's name was Scissors and the chief-of-staff was Paste. Henry Lawson cheekily entered his small office off George St, Brickfield Hill and 'thanked' him for paying him the 'honour' of stealing his poem ‘The Cambaroora Star’, which Ted Brady had in fact plagiarized for the Workman. They retired to the “hostel” next door “patronised by contiguous friends of the Cause, where they gave you long sleevers of colonial for threepence, and customers were free to broken ship’s biscuits and small squares of cheese. We talked ... and parted reluctantly ..” (Brady). They discussed the fact that “Australia starves its poets and erects statues to their memories”. Lawson and Brady became firm mates, and Henry even echoed the younger Brady in ‘A Song of Southern Writers’.

One day in mid-1892, Jules François Archibald, the illustrious founder and editor of The Bulletin, was worried about Henry Lawson, then aged 25 and becoming a national celebrity for his poetry, and who ‘Archy’ felt was drinking too much and becoming “the poet of The Rocks” instead of the Poet of Australia. He arranged with Lawson’s best pal Brady to get Lawson, with The Bulletin’s five pounds, to go to Bourke. It was Lawson’s nine months in the Outback that he mined for ‘copy’ for his stories and poems for the rest of his troubled life.

Dr Bob James notes that in the Australian Worker of March 26, 1892, either George Black or Sam Rosa called him “up-to-the-knees-in-blood, barricade fighter Brady”, and Brady was sometimes accused of being a bomber, and at other times a police pimp (informer) and agent provocateur.

In 1892, while Secretary of the Australian Socialist League, he was editor of the Australian Workman. In 1895, the day after his divorce from his wife Marion Walsh (married October 30, 1890), he married labor activist Creo Stanley, though this relationship did not last long either. In his day, Brady edited various journals: The Australian Workman, The Dead Bird (later called Bird-o’-Freedom and then renamed The Arrow), The Worker and The Native Companion. 

In August, 1901, at Grafton, New South Wales (near where your almanackist is now writing), he became part-owner (with Miss Susan Penrose, who came from a pastoralist family in the area) and editor of The Grip until July, 1903, clashing with the local council and losing advertisers. In 1903 he set up (in Sydney) the Commonwealth Press Agency. He succeeded George Black as editor of the Labor paper The Worker, from August, 1904. Late in 1906 he departed Sydney for Melbourne where he became as involved with left-wing and artistic circles as he had been in his youth in Sydney. There he edited The Native Companion, ran his press agency and was an advertising representative for John Norton's Truth.

Brady loved the Mallacoota district just south of the Victorian border near Eden, NSW, and began what was known as Mallacoota Community Farm, a cooperative settlement. It was there that in 1910 and with little success, Brady took Lawson to “dry out” from his addiction to alcohol, and it is at Mallacoota that EJ Brady lies, in the community cemetery. EJ Brady died on August 22, 1952.

Pip wishes to thank the excellent Clarence River Historical Society Inc. (especially Mr Frank Mack), and Mr Stephen Tatham, a Grafton-based historian with a wealth of information that space did not allow in this article. Pip also acknowledges the information in John B Webb’s critical biography of EJ Brady.

“In 1880 the Brady family moved to Washington for two years, where the young boy became an object of great attention and curiosity at the local school. He argued with his schoolmates the merits of the political systems of the two countries and, no doubt swamped by superior numbers, became convinced of the virtues of republicanism ...

“Brady, along with Roderic Quinn and Christopher Brennan, attended St. Francis’ School in Haymarket in 1882, but the next year saw him at St. Mary’s School, from where he passed the Civil Service Examination in October. Then Quinn and Brady went on to the Marist Brother school at Harrington Street while Brennan proceeded to Riverview ...

"Leaving the University without graduating, Brady was “compelled to pick up the wage-slave’s burden again” and secured a job as timekeeper on the Sydney wharves for Dalgety and Company at a pound a week and a shilling an hour overtime ...

“1890 was a momentous year for Brady. The Maritime Strike being in progress, Dalgety and Co., in common with many other firms at the time, were sweating in their employees as special constables to help police the stores and warehouses long the waterfront where wool shorn by non-union labour was beginning to arrive. When Brady refused this assignment as a matter of principle, regarding it as a form of treason against the workers whom he saw actively trying to better their working conditions and wages, he was instantly dismissed ...

“Stirred by events, Brady sought means of rendering assistance to what he regarded as the underprivileged class. In short time he had taken three significant steps – joined the Australian Socialist League and become [sic] its Secretary, become a member of the Labor Electoral League (later the Australian Labor Party) and editor of its first official newspaper, The Australian Workman, and had organised The Clerical and Merchantile [sic] Workers’ Association, the first union for clerical workers and warehousemen.

“The Australian Socialist League had been formed in May 1887 by William McNamara and A.M. Pilter.3 It distributed the works of Marx, Hyndman and other socialists and became the centre of weekly debates and lectures. Among its early members were W. Higgs and W.M. Hughes, one becoming later a Labor member of Parliament and the other, of course, Prime Minister. Prior to Brady’s enrolment, McNamara had served as both Secretary and President before his transfer to
Melbourne. During Brady’s secretary-ship he admitted to membership W.A. Holman, a staunch friend later to become Premier of New South Wales ...

“He married Marion Cecilia Walsh at Paddington 30th October [1890], beginning a union which lasted in spirit only until April of the following year when, according to Brady, a child was born of whom he was not the father. A private enquiry agent was engaged, the result being a legal divorce in 1894. ...

“He also contributed to The Bird-O’-Freedom and the Freeman’s Journal. In his unpublished biography of J.F. Archibald, Brady recounts how W.H. Traill, former Managing-Director and Editor-in-chief of The Bulletin was elected in 1889 to represent South Sydney. Later on, after sitting in two parliamentary sessions, and after trying his hand at pig and poultry farming, Traill became editor of Truth and promptly fired him and John Norton – Brady going on to the Sunday Times at more
money. Soon after, however, Norton returned to Truth where he 'howled, snarled and
barked so well that he died worth a quarter of a million or so' ...

“Brady’s acquaintances and friends included the majore [sic] figures of his day, not only political, but also literary and artistic: A.G. Taylor (first editor of Truth and the Spectator), John Norton, King O’Malley, Edmund Barton, Dan Green, E.W. O’Sullivan, J.C. Williamson, W. Holman, W.M. Hughes, Nt Gould (later to work with Brady on The Arrow), David McKee Wright, Lawson, Quinn, George Gordon McCrae and his son Hugh, John Farrell, Brunton Stephens, A.G. Stephens, J.F. Archibald, Victor Daley, A.B. Paterson and Barcroft Boake. There were many others too, especially in the literary field – John Le Gay Brereton, F.J. Dwyer, James Ryan, Edmund Fisher, Ure Smith and Mary Gilmore, Marie J. Pitt and Ethel Turner.”
Source: Critical biography, by John B Webb, MA (PDF)

“In 1890, Edwin Brady took William Morris'ss [sic] utopian novel from the library shelves and marvelled at the revelation of a world under socialism. In Brady's case, one sees the connections between politics and literature, 'reading and living'. As a young clerk he had mastered the precepts of political economy, struggling to recognise the laws of supply and demand amidst the chaos of overloaded ships and men on the wharves of Darling Harbour. Brady's estrangement from church and family coincided with his reading of Darwin and Huxley. 1890, the year Brady read Marx, Gronlund and Morris, was also the year of the Maritime Strike: that August he was dismissed from Dalgety's for refusing to act as a special constable. From there his books took him beyond all that was safe, conventional and familiar: an angry young man 'at war with the world', Brady traded the complacent security of home and office for the boozy fellowship of boarding house and Bulletin.

“If the books Brady read had changed, so too had the way he read them. In 'early youth' he 'endeavoured to look upon men and matters through the lenses of an exact science'. The very terms he used suggest the earnestness of this engagement: books were to be 'swotted', 'studied', mastered. They were to be read silently and alone, in libraries and universities dedicated to the solitary pursuit of learning. But as Brady left what he called 'the dignified atmosphere of the counting house' for the 'super radical' excesses of bohemia, his approach to reading changed dramatically. On winter nights and summer afternoons, Brady and his mates gathered in his 'little den in Annandale' or journeyed to The Gap and read books to each other, 'smoking and yarning'. In bohemia, books were not so much studied as celebrated, and reading was like a 'long [draught] of colonial ale', a delight men savoured together.”   Source

"Early on a republican and literary-bohemian, he became known in later life for travel books and poetry before returning to labor writing and communism in the 1930's.

"In the period 1890-92, the evidence suggests that he dabbled in revolution, dynamite and conspiracies and then became either a police-spy or, at best, a reactionary reporter damming what he had once believed. The reasons for the change appear to be an exaggerated ego, disillusion with labor-leaders and domestic upheavals."   Source

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson    Was Brady a bomber?

« Index of articles on folklore and other topics

The Louisa and Henry Lawson Online Chronology

Edwin Brady at Mallacoota